Real Patients: Complications of Type 1 Diabetes

Transcript

Diabetes in and of itself causes nothing. Poorly managed diabetes, when your blood sugars are high on a consistent basis, your body is really stressed.

Due to my high blood sugar my blood flows slower than the average person ‘cause it’s more thicker.

Your heart has to work much harder to pump around the syrupy blood that’s associated with diabetes. And so your heart is working very, very hard.

Going through a minor heart attack and that’s all due to me not taking care of my body with the high blood sugars.

I started to have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and then eye problems started.

Recently I actually found out that I was diagnosed with a, with a early stages of a rare diabetic eye disease. Which causes black spots in your eyes and can eventually cause blindness.

I’m wearing glasses now. Well for like long distance. Like trying to read from afar. And I didn’t have that problem. Before I had like beyond perfect vision. And I was like, oh no.

My vision is not perfect and it is, it still suffers from the diabetes symptoms but it’s still there and I’m thankful for it.

Neuropathy can cause not just pain and foot sores, it doesn’t cause the foot sores, you actually get a sore.

Diabetic neuropathy is when your, you feel numb.

Say you wear a new pair of shoes and you get a blister. A lot of people that happens. You get a little blister at first. But if you have neuropathy you may not even realize you have a blister because you’re numb and you can’t feel the blister and it might be hidden from your view. You don’t notice it.

Open sores don’t heal quick and so if you have an open sore it could also develop into other further complications which might even cause you to amputate your toes or your foot.

And so that’s why that’s important to take care of your feet and to notice sores because you may not feel them.

When you’re diagnosed with being diabetic or having diabetes, you need to take it serious because no one is invisible.

Don’t be a knucklehead about it. Don’t be like me and think you can, you can take it on and do whatever you want.

If it’s not one thing it’s another. If you don’t have eye problems, you have kidney problems. If you don’t have kidney problems you have other health issues that complicate everything.

So all of these things are related to the syrupy blood that’s associated with poorly managed diabetes.

If you just approach the situation from the beginning correctly, you’re just going to get into a routine and you don’t have to get over the bumps ‘cause there aren’t any.

If your diabetes is well managed and you keep your blood sugars in a healthy level, in a healthy range, you’re much less likely to have those kinds of conditions. Much less likely to experience complications of all kinds.